Video chat is becoming an essential part of medicine during the coronavirus crisis.

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You can’t walk into the intensive care units at St. Luke’s University Health Network because of concerns over spreading the novel coronavirus. But if you did, you’d see something new amid the beds, medical equipment and tubes. It’s a device with Microsoft’s Teams software running.

St. Luke’s, which also calls itself SLUHN, was doing little with telehealth before the crisis. Its most notable initiative was a video chat device kept in the ER to help digitally bring doctors in other parts of the hospital to the bedside of suspected stroke patients. With the coronavirus, doctors needed to find new ways to treat patients without constantly changing in and out of layers of protective gear.

“We scoured our network for devices,” said Dr. James Balshi, the chief medical information officer for SLUHN and a vascular surgeon. Now it has about 100 devices it can bring to the ICU and some other beds, using Microsoft’s Teams video chat software to offer patients a way to communicate with doctors whether they’re in the room or not. “A telephone is better than nothing, but it doesn’t come close to looking at someone and seeing their facial expressions — it’s one of the most powerful parts of this.”

Our sudden reliance on video chat has made apps such as Zoom, Cisco’s WebEx, Apple’s FaceTime, Google’s Duo, Houseparty and Microsoft’s Skype daily parts of people’s lives. For Teams in particular, that’s translated into more than 40% growth in people using its product over the past couple months.

Still, it appears our broader use of video chat will likely continue after the crisis calms. For SLUHN, positive reception by even once reluctant doctors has helped to make that case, as well as Microsoft’s compliance with medical privacy laws.

SLUHN has encountered bumps along the way though. Doctors learned it’s harder for some people, particularly Parkinson’s patients and the elderly, to download the app and set it up for their virtual doctor visits, for example.

A doctor helps a patient use their phone.

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“Not everybody has the son or daughter who can come over, especially now, and set you up,” Balshi said. It’s also another app patients have to deal with, on top of managing their electronic medical records.

Still, Balshi sees promise. The hospital network’s begun using Teams video chat for doctor visits too. It’s now notching about 3,000 per day. That’s half of what the hospitals normally provide, Balshi said, but still up from almost none before the crisis began.

“The reluctance and the uncertainty about it is gone,” he said. “Almost every provider in our network has had some contact with this now and has said, ‘Hey, we could do this and this works.'”